These bottlecaps, presumably for beer bottles (or soda bottles in predominantly non-drinking communities such as Islamabad (or water bottles in predominantly non-drinking caffeine-free communities such as Salt Lake City)) contain statements that, when read out loud, will encourage the nearest short-tempered
lady or gentleman to desire to strike you.

In bottles of Budweiser, you might find the statement, "Man, your girlfriend/wife/mistress sure is ugly."

In bottles of Stella Artois, you might find, "I'm not saying Leibniz was right, I'm just saying that maybe Kant isn't all he's cracked up to be."*

In bottles of Tennent's, you might find, "Wow, whacking a tiny ball with a stick and putting skirts on men. Who's the genius who thought this one up?"

All for the sake of livening up what might otherwise be a rather boring drinking experience.**

*I'm not aware that philosophy arguments ever devolve into fisticuffs, but it might be fun to watch.

**If your experience is fine so far, these are all, of course, optional.

If someone was to think that I have a girlfriend, a wife and a mistress, I'd take it as a compliment. Seriously, no Bud drinker is ever going to use the word "mistress"--"girlfriend" is the acceptable term.

Here we call beer bottles stubbies or tallies. And yes, a lot of pubs will serve in the bottle. Especially for boutique or rarer beers for which it is not worthwhile keeping a kegload of. I'm surprised by your comment... Do you have available so small a range of beers that there are always kegs available for each brand on hand?

Pubs are sadly phasing out the use of bottles because people had an irritating habit of hitting each other with them. Just like the glass ... er,. glass is being phased out as well. I think there is actually a law here somewhere about no glass glasses after a certian time.

I understand that in Europe they got all kinds of different languages. They used to fight with each other all the time over there, but now they are even sharing the same money. I bet in Belgium they sometimes have trouble insulting a guy, both because of language barriers and general senescent peacability. One could have language specific insults in these bottle caps. For example, Flemish "yo mamma" jokes. The bottle caps would come out with one language per issue, so the Flems presented with a barrage of insults and jokes would have no recourse to, say, Lichtensteinese bottle caps to reply in kind. The only solution: a duel! Later the Lichtensteiners would get their turn with the Lichtensteinese language issue and unless they had saved up some of those Flemish bottlecaps from earlier, they likewise would have to respond with force to defend drunken honor. Merriment!

Baked. There's a design for taking a standard bottle design, casting it in an engineering glass, then heat treating and laser etching it so that when held by the neck and the base is struck hard, it falls away cleanly to leave the user holding a useful (and very sharp) dagger.

They were designed as a stealth weapon for easy deployment against civil aircraft. Not sure how many were produced but we had half a dozen, we still have the dagger bit in a drawer somewhere. They even got hold of real labels from the brand manufactures, so they were indistinguishable from geniune product.

Would one hurl the bottle into the sky to strike the aircraft, or wait until the aircraft had landed and slash at the landing gear? Or maybe this is a dirigible-specific weapon? Also, I wonder about the necessity of stealth, as the aircraft I have seen are not especially wily.

You're behind the times ... having developed smart bombs, the next Big Thing is smart aircraft - smarter than most people, anyway.

The idea is that you wave the spiky bit of glass at the 'plane and shout "Just think what a mess this will make of your paintwork !"

The idea seemed to be along the lines of "Well, if we've got this, we (The Good Guys) could use it on board an aircraft belonging to Them (The Bad Guys - see list of whoever are The Bad Guys at any given time, the one constant is the French are always at the top of the list) and of course it is OK for us to have this technology as we are The Good Guys and will not use it for any wrong or immoral purpose due to our high ethical standards, unless of cousre we really want to or it seems like a good idea at the time, and besides we can aways hide behind plausible deniablility because being The Good Guys we would only ever develop something like this so that we could work out conutermeasures in case the The Bad Guys (whoever they are right now - see list) also develop this, or just happen to be previous friends of ours who aren't friends anymore.

This reminds me of one of my all time favorite HB ideas, now sadly deleted - alternate approved weapon uses for common household objects. The author worried that if soldiers ran out of weapons they would be at a loss for how to carry on the war.

What's with the philosophy discussion on bottles of Stella? In London, a place I think consumes more Stella then the rest of the world combined, the beer is known as 'Wife Beater' and nobody who reads a bottle cap like that would pronounce any of the names correctly or even know who Kant was.

For Stella, there should be an action, such as 'Slap the nearest person next to you', or 'Shove anyone in a dress' or 'Yell in someone's ear', 'Dry hump something/someone', 'Call any girl a slag/chav/etc...'.